{"id":2358,"date":"2019-04-02T11:21:59","date_gmt":"2019-04-02T15:21:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/?p=2358"},"modified":"2019-04-02T13:55:01","modified_gmt":"2019-04-02T17:55:01","slug":"a-sense-of-presence-poetry-and-the-education-of-the-soul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/a-sense-of-presence-poetry-and-the-education-of-the-soul\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cA Sense of Presence\u201d: Poetry and the Education of the Soul"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

From the Introduction to The Paraclete Poetry Anthology<\/a><\/em> by Mark S. Burrows<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where do we find what\u2019s lasting? Where do the deathless
things hide? . . . Maybe we\u2019re not altogether alone in
our empty room, in our workshop: if so many writers
love solitude it may be because they\u2019re not really all that
lonely. There really is a higher voice that sometimes\u2014
too rarely\u2014speaks. We catch it only in the moments of
our greatest concentration. This voice may only speak
once, it may make itself heard only after long years of
waiting; still, it changes everything.1<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

We are made for poems. As children, we come to them naturally, delighting in how words play on our tongues, whether in nursery rhymes and lullabies or the songs we make up in the delicious hours of daydreaming. In their early presence in our lives, poems are companions to us in the ways they lure us into the dance of speech. They are for us tools of discovery and expression, inviting us to delight in the newness of language, initially for their sounds but just as surely for their manifold senses\u2014and the playful hesitations that come between.2 We are made for words and seem destined for poems, giving ourselves over to their allure long before we can read. With them, we learn to new-name the world: in our first speech, we discover our world with words\u2014some real, many imagined\u2014that help us negotiate our lives from day to day. Indeed, words seem to discover us in childhood, finding out what they are capable of through the unexpected ways we play with them. A word on children\u2019s lips can be an epiphany\u2014for themselves, for those around them, perhaps even for language itself. This is one of the ways poems live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sadly, we seem to drift apart from such enjoyments as we grow older. Poems can come to seem a luxury at best and an irrelevance at worst, driven as we are by the duties of work and ensnared in what Wordsworth more than two centuries ago memorably described as \u201cthe world\u201d that is<\/p>\n\n\n\n

. . . too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The problem is clearly not a new one. It is part and parcel of a form of life Wordsworth sensed, even if he could not have imagined how it might develop over the centuries of industrialization and the recent emergence of the \u201cinformation age.\u201d Yet he already knew the feeling we also experience in having \u201cgiven our heart away, a sordid boon!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A hundred years later, long before anyone could imagine the velocities of jet travel or the Internet\u2019s conveyance of information at the speed of light, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke gave us a way of naming our plight:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My life is not this steep hour
in which you see me hurrying so. . .3<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Speed has come to measure the outward shape of our experience, but Rilke knew that it had little to do with our inner core where we come to know ourselves as \u201cthe stillness between two sounds,\u201d as he went on to put it. Even if the relentless tempo of our lives seems far removed from the temperament of our heart, our yearning for this sense of stillness suggests what philosophers and theologians have long named the soul.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As we grow older, the presence of young children reminds us of the purpose poetry might still hold for us. This happens in the quiet hours spent reading with them, or in those precious moments when we witness a child\u2019s gleeful discovery of words. In the ways they seem instinctively attuned to the delight that words in their instrumentality play in our lives, children help us feel again the marvel of how words bring us what the poet Jane Hirshfield describes as \u201ca doubled awareness,\u201d4 expanding our sense of reality beyond the literal sense. Fr. John-Julian suggests this when he suggests how vision moves in two directions and with two intensities at once:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eyes have I that see
behind the eye,
within the tree
above the sky . . .5<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This ability to see \u201cbehind the eye,\u201d to be carried by metaphor from the outer to the inner and back again, to imagine something as delightfully impossible as seeing \u201cwithin the tree above the sky\u201d: all this is what makes poems essential for the vibrancy and sanctity of life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Notes for the Introduction<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. Adam Zagajewski, \u201cThe Shabby and the Sublime,\u201d in A Defense of Ardor<\/em>, trans. Clare Cavanagh (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 37, 44 <\/li>
  2. Paul Val\u00e9ry speaks of poetry as \u201cthe prolonged hesitation between sound and sense,\u201d a claim that plays on the close sounds in the French\u2014i.e., \u201cle son\u201d (the sound) and \u201cle sens\u201d (the sense).<\/li>
  3. Rilke, 168. This and other citations, unless otherwise noted, refer to this volume.<\/li>
  4. Jane Hirshfield, \u201cStrange Reaches, Impossibility, and Big Hidden Drawers,\u201d in Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World <\/em>(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), 287.In the last of Rilke\u2019s late Sonnets to Orpheus<\/em>, he invites us to \u201cgo forth in this change, leaving and coming.\u201d See below, 179.<\/li>
  5. Hilde Domin, \u201cLyrik,\u201d in S\u00e4mtliche Gedichte<\/em>, 113 (my translation). <\/li>
  6. Thurston, \u201cThe Sixth Day,\u201d 84.<\/li>
  7. Cairns, \u201cSacred Time,\u201d p. 2. Charles Taylor speaks of this as a \u201csense of fullness\u201d; see A Secular Age <\/em>(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 5.<\/li>
  8. Simone Weil, Waiting for God<\/em>, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: G. P. Putnam\u2019s Sons, 1951), 112.<\/li>
  9. Robert Frost, \u201cThe Figure a Poem Makes,\u201d in Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays <\/em>(New York: Library of America, 1995), 777.<\/li>
  10. On this theme and its relation to the arts, see George Steiner, RealPresences<\/em><\/li>
  11. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 226ff.<\/li>
  12. The phrase echoes the ancient Hebrew text Jesus invoked in the wilderness (see Matt. 4:1\u20134, and Deut. 8:3). Hilde Domin, \u201cDie Heiligen,\u201d in Nur eine<\/g> Rose als<\/g> St\u00fctze<\/em>. Gedichte <\/em>(Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Verlag, 1994), 30 (my translation).<\/li>
  13. Kamie\u0144ska, \u201cOn The Threshold of the Poem,\u201d xxix.<\/li>
  14. Jane Hirshfield, Hiddenness, Uncertainty, Surprise: Three Generative Energies of Poetry<\/em><\/li>
  15. (Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 2008), 45, 49\u201350.<\/li>
  16. Rilke, 180<\/li>
  17. Zagajewski, 44.<\/li>
  18. Rilke, 179.<\/li><\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    From the Introduction to The Paraclete Poetry Anthology by Mark S. Burrows Where do we find what\u2019s lasting? Where do the deathlessthings hide? . . . Maybe we\u2019re not altogether alone inour empty room, in our workshop: if so many writerslove … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-paraclete-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2358\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}